A question often asked is what the university has to do with the general crisis in society? Clearly all public institutions are faced with cuts to their funding. In the university this has led to calls by university managers for a re-introduction of fees as well as a host of other options devised to generate resources from the private sector.

But these are symptoms of a more general crisis. While it is important that we fight against these tendencies the most we can hope for from such reaction is that we maintain things as they are. By constantly being defensive we turn the university back into the closed institution of the past. We forget to think about what it is we are defending- is it exams, jaded teachers, boring, outdated text books, hierarchies, bureaucracy, an increasingly worthless qualification in an economy with no jobs?

While we must reject the current consensus that subordinates everything to the market we have to go beyond that rejection. What we want must be fought for beyond the existing university walls. The university is not separate from the world that sustains it. Connecting to other struggles, turning education into something living, is a way to go beyond the limited hopes of defending what we have. We have to aim higher.

On 13th of May a contingent from the Knowledge Liberation Front will travel to Tunisia to meet up with students and activists who have been part of a living struggle. This is not only a journey to build solidarity but also a journey to learn. It is a living education.

Student politics is broken. With the exception of those running for Exec. positions who have begun to believe their own bullshit, we all know this without having to be told. We see the bizarre spectacle of candidates and their acolytes in brightly-coloured matching t-shirt rushing around trying to give you a sticker or a packet of Haribo in exchange for a vote, and making promises so outlandish that to call them impossible would be to credit them with an undeserved sense of dignity, and we feel instinctively that this is not the way that things were meant to be.

But that feeling that something is wrong hints at another way of doing things – at a dim unspoken vision of what student politics should be, and could be in some distant future. This article is an attempt to give some solidity to that alternative vision.

Even Zimbabwe holds elections

Right now, the Students’ Union is not a functioning democracy. What we have is an on-paper democracy: we have democratic structures (elections, Union Council etc.) but without any participation by the vast majority of students in the decision-making of the Union.

Part of the problem stems from the way candidates approach elections, most of which doesn’t even rise to the level of Jackie Healy-Rae clientelism, who had, at least, some idea of what the voters of South Kerry actually wanted, and (when the cards fell right for him) some prospect of getting it. In student politics, the electorate is treated with the utmost of contempt. When you are handed a can of Red Bull and told “vote for me”, the message is that it doesn’t matter what you think, all the candidate is interested in is your vote. When you are handed a manifesto which promises a new indoor ice-skating rink or an international airport or whatever, the message is that you as an ordinary student are too stupid to understand the intricacies of actual decision-making. Worse still, students have become so used to being spoken to in this manner that whenever genuine people come along, they must either adopt this approach to campaigning, or simply fade into obscurity.

In between elections, then, Union Council is supposed to serve as the organ of popular decision-making. The reality is somewhat different. Every year, Union Council is populated by the same clique of SU insiders, many of whom have aspirations of running for SU office in the future, with another stratum of wannabe insiders who haven’t quite made it into the clique just yet. Once elected (i.e. once they’ve found ten of their friends to sign their nomination form), Union Councillors are able to drop all pretence of actually representing a constituency, or even caring what their classmates think about the Union, and pursue their own personal agendas through the SU structures.

The Exec., meanwhile, undertake only the most minimal and perfunctory attempts to get ordinary students into UC positions, which usually involve visiting a couple of 1st Arts classes, with the result that many constituencies don’t even have tokenistic representation is the decision-making structures. So what’s the solution? The solution certainly isn’t to be found in vague nice-sounding soundbites about putting the U back in SU, which are so popular with candidates at this time of year. Candidates have been using similar slogan’s for decades and the U is still quite firmly absent from the reality of the SU. (Also, you can’t spell Union without ion, although I’m not sure what relevance that has.)

Nor is a solution to be found in electing student politicians who are good listeners or more approachable or more willing to take people’s suggestions on board. The reality is that the average student isn’t a well of fully-formed Good Ideas just waiting to be tapped by the right person. Good ideas come about through a process of mutual discussion, where the unique and subjective experiences of individual students are brought to the table, discussed, argued over, perhaps even fought over, and a conclusion is reached which is better than the sum of the parts. The problem therefore is a deeper one of how decision-making is approached. We need an SU which really involves as many students as possible in decision-making and which gives them the power to actually make decisions.

Something like that already exists on paper within the structures of the SU, but in a way which makes it practically unimplementable, namely the Union General Meeting. If we’re serious about the idea of making the SU democratic in a real and practical way, then bringing back mass assemblies is something that must be looked at.

The Students’ Union is not the Make-a-Wish Foundation

Yes it would be nice if there was a new swimming pool complex on campus, or if the condom machines in the SU jacks sold cocaine, or whatever other Awesome Thing you can imagine. But not only are these things impossible, they are also not what student politics should be about. The Students’ Union isn’t supposed to be a mechanism for student to somehow get loads of Awesome Things from somewhere. It’s a Union. It’s about representation. It’s about collective bargaining. It’s about lots of struggles, some of them small and boring, some of them big and exciting, to make the lives of students materially better in tangible ways. It’s a real and serious problem that the everyday struggles which really matter to the lives of students never get seriously discussed, because we’re too busy talking about which of the Awesome Things that candidates plucked out of thin air is most desirable/feasible.

Putting the ‘politics’ back into student politics

The Student’s Union is also not some kind of apolitical neutral service provider. Like it or not, a lot of the struggles in which students find themselves (most obviously against fees and for grants, but there are others) are inherently and necessarily political struggles. But despite this, student politicians – even those with strong and deeply-held political beliefs – run a mile from even the whiff of a strong political position. Why? Anyone can say they are against fees and want to campaign against fees, and in fact every candidate in every SU in the country says precisely this. The important question is how and why?

There’s a big difference between someone motivated by left-wing ideology who believes the campaign is best fought on the streets and who sees the fight against fees as being linked in with the struggles of workers and a right-winger who believes that the solution is effective lobbying and that the fight against fees is a fight against (public sector) workers to decide who feels the brunt of the cuts. I’ve written elsewhere about why I think it should be the former and not the latter, but that’s not the point of this article. The point is these questions matter, and as long as candidates are allowed (and indeed encouraged) to pretend that they don’t have any political opinions, then we’re very much gambling that what they mean when they say “against fees” is the same thing we mean.